Privacy czar: Facebook should be quicker to face privacy issues

By MICHAEL OLIVEIRA The Canadian PressPublished April 5, 2012 - 4:22am Last Updated April 5, 2012 - 5:43am

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TORONTO — Facebook should work harder to make new features more user friendly on Day 1 and anticipate privacy concerns before they upset users, says Canada’s privacy commissioner.

On Wednesday, Jennifer Stoddart released the results of three investigations into complaints received about Facebook, including one that found fault with one of the social media giant’s features.

"Looking at the results of these investigations compared to when we first investigated the organization a few years ago, Facebook appears to be giving privacy more consideration in some areas, including providing clearer, more understandable information to members on various personal information handling practices," Stoddart said in a release.

"Despite these general improvements, we were disappointed that Facebook hadn’t anticipated the widespread privacy concerns that followed the launch of its ’friend suggestion’ feature. Privacy must be built in at the front-end — not added after the fact in response to negative reactions from individual users and data protection authorities."

The friend-suggestion complaint was based on concerns that Facebook was accessing email address books without consent. Upon receiving an emailed invitation to join Facebook, three complainants noticed the message included a list of friends already on the social network. Given they never registered for the site, they questioned how Facebook could have known about the people in their real-world social networks.

Stoddart said no evidence was found to suggest address books were accessed unlawfully but Facebook did violate the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act by not obtaining consent from non-users to use their email and not providing an easy way to opt-out.

But the case is now considered closed since Facebook has since addressed those issues.

The other two investigations concluded that the complaints were "not well-founded."

One user complained about the potential collection and sharing of data related to Facebook’s social plug-ins, which allow users to "Like" or "Recommend" pages from around the web. The investigation found that the plug-ins do not share personal information with other websites, and agreed with Facebook’s assertion that users "implicitly consent" to the collection of some technical data when they use a website.

Another user complained that Facebook required too much personal information to create and use an account. The user said she was asked for a mobile phone number to verify her identity to Facebook and she refused, since she had no cellphone. She then found herself unable to access the site. But the privacy commissioner concluded that it was a reasonable request for security purposes and other authentication options were also available to the user.